I have listened to Everything Touches Everything more times than I care to think about, but I am still having trouble pegging down what exactly feeds my desire to chuck this CD in my resale stack and listen to something else. Taken individually, any of these mid-tempo songs might make decent background music to a Buick commercial. And if one of the tracks came on while you were at a bar, you'd probably find your fingers drumming against your half-empty bottle in time to the beat. Yet confronting the entire object at once, I can't help but feel something is just a little off.
Perhaps it's the vague sense of déjà vu that clings to almost every track. The band never overtly steals from any other artist (except maybe for singer Jesse Elliot's bizarre hijacking of J Mascis's high-register slacker vocal delivery), but many songs bear just enough of a resemblance to famous tunes I actually like to keep me distracted: the lead guitar figure lilting over the thrumming rhythm of album opener “I Want You to Keep Everything” reminds me of Tom Petty's “American Girl”; the way the rhythm guitar in “End” drops into the background during the verses conjures Social Distortion's cover of “Ring of Fire”; the lead riff of the title track sounds too much like Pat Benatar's “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” for even the rousing chorus of “whoa-oh-ohs” to win me over.
Add to these deficiencies the honest-to-goodness missteps, like the tired electric bluegrass of “I'm Gonna Assemble a City,” and my distaste for the album starts making even more sense. With lines like “I'm gonna sit in my lawn chair, as the missiles and maggots bore,” it positively reeks of dirty hippie-dom. And then there's the band's single labored attempt at experimentalism, the stilted 30-second quasi-freakout towards the end of “Good Night Wish” that creeps up out of nowhere and promptly disappears, like an awkward profession of love at an office holiday celebration that both parties tacitly agree never to mention again.
Everything Touches Everything is not so much an album completely without merit as it is an album whose merits are fairly inconsequential. Of course, it's more than reasonable to expect that some people will find pleasure in These United States' ability to channel the pop and energy of their favorite bar jams. But when all is said and done, who wouldn't rather take a trip down to their favorite watering hole, feed a dollar to the jukebox, and just listen to the real thing?
1. I Want You to Keep Everything
2. Will It Ever
3. Everything Touches Everything
4. Nights & the Revolution
5. The Secret Door
6. Conquests & Consequence
7. I'm Gonna Assemble a City
8. Good Bones
9. The Important Thing
10. End
11. Good Night Wish
More about: These United States
